WHATREALLYHAPPENED.INFO
Why Six Million?
How do we know the number?
Everyone knows that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. How do we know it? Because everybody else knows it. The figure has been accepted as accurate and without question since as long ago as 1945. But are not this universal knowledge, certainty and immutability rather unique? How many Ukrainians died in the Second World War? How many civilians died in the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad or in the bombing of Tokyo? How many have died in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its consequences? Nobody really knows, and in this last case you will find figures differing almost by a factor of 10 depending on how you interpret the question, how you gather your evidence, from what sources and who is publishing it, etc. Yet Iraq has beeen open to access by the media and by investigative bodies to an immeasurably greater extent than was the case in Eastern Europe in the Second World War and its aftermath. How many Germans died in the evacuation of the Eastern territories in 1945? You will find figures quoted in a range of 500,000 to 3,000,000, usually more informed by political bias than by demography.
The six million
figure is broken down quite differently depending on who
is doing the calculations, with, in the most extreme
case, Lucy Dawidowicz giving 1,300,000 Jewish deaths
for the Majdanek camp and Raul Hilberg less than
100,000 of whom 50,000 were Jews. The
“official” total for Majdanek today is 78,000
dead, all groups combined. These historians have
struggled to reach the Holy Grail of Six Million, with
Dawidowicz stopping just short at 5,900,000, Hilberg
managing only 5,100,000 and the first in the field,
Gerald Reitlinger, falling very short indeed at just
over 4,000,000, which perhaps explains why he has fallen
into oblivion. Figures for individual camps are
regularly revised downward, but the Six Million remains
intact and sacrosanct.
The origins of the Six Million
Though the meme of "Six Million Jews" can be traced back to the 19th century, it first gained prominence during WW1 in America. It concerned Russian Jews: at that time the six-million story repeatedly focussed upon what was allegedly happening in Russia - ‘the six million Jews in Russia’ etc.1915.
- The Sun NY: six million Jews are being persecuted... 4
June 1915
- New York Times: Six million souls will need help when war is ended... 18 October, 1918.
- New York Times: ‘6,000,000 are in peril’ ‘6,000,000 souls .. are going to be completely exterminated – article about Ukrainian Jews, 8 September, 1919.
- New York Times:Terrible plight of Jews, "worst sufferers
in the War": 6,000,000 souls are in dire poverty,
starvation..., 12 November 1919
Don Heddesheimer’s book, The First Holocaust: Jewish Fundraising Campaigns With Holocaust Claims During and After World War One details the slew of Jewish atrocity propaganda even from before World War I. The First Holocaust features a remarkable collection of press clippings and propaganda articles dating back to the late 19th century whereby claims of the suffering and imminent extermination of European Jewry were used for fundraising. The magic six million number may have got going around the time of the First International Zionist Congress of 1897.
The
1930s and 1940s
The story
gradually moved from the US to Europe and in the
1930s came to focus upon what Germany was doing.
The Holocaust of European Jews concept first
appears in 1936:
- New York Times 31.5.36: ‘The European Holocaust’
In February 1943 the Reader’s Digest
announced that six million Jews were being
massacred (in an article by the Jewish Hollywood
script-writer Ben Hecht, a supporter of Jewish
terrorism in Palestine).
Finally in 1945, "Six
million Jews are dead" was
proclaimed at Nuremberg. The total of six
million was not the result of any statistical
assessment, but the culmination of this mythical
story that had been gathering momentum through the
first half of the 20th century.
Stories
of "Six Million" in the press 1900-45
Between 1900 and 1945, at least 167 references have been found in newspapers and elsewhere to "six million Jews ", usually in a context of danger, most frequently of mortal danger:
- 1900 - Stephen S. Wise, New York Times, June 11, 1900: "There are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism."
- 1902 - Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th Edition, Vol. 25, 1902, page 482: "While there are in Russia and Rumania six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded ..."
- 1902 - Samuel W. Goldstein, New York Times, November 27, 1902: "PLEA FOR ZIONISM ... In answer I would say: Does Dr. Silverman represent the 6,000,000 Jews in Russia, 300,000 in Roumania and the 1,000,000 in Galicia?"
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- 1944 - Nahum Goldmann, Jewish Western Bulletin, December 8th, 1944: " ... apart from Jewish losses in combat service, 5,500,000 Jews have been killed in Germany and German-occupied tesritories [territories] since the outbreak of the awr [war]. These figures exceed the number anticipated even by the most pessimistic. ... Yes, the Germans murdered close to six million Jews ... "
- 1944 - Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet War News, December 22nd, 1944: "In the regions they seized, Germans killed all Jews, from the old folks to infants in arms. Ask any German prisoners why his fellow countrymen annihilated six million innocent people ... "
- 1945 - New York Times, January 8th, 1945: "6,000,000 JEWS DEAD. The Jewish population in Europe has been reduced from 9,500,000 in 1939 to 3,500,000. Of the 6,000,000 European Jews who have died, 5,000,000 had lived in the countries under Hitler's occupation."
Click here to see the full list of 167 references
At Nuremberg, where the US delegation was predominantly Jewish, it was affirmed that six million Jews had been exterminated. The SS agent Wilhelm Höttl declared—on condition that his life was spared— that he had heard such a story from Adolf Eichmann in August 1944. That statement was dated 5 November, 1945. His affidavit stated that four million were killed in camps, the other two million were killed in other ways, e.g. shot in the East by the ‘Einsatzgruppen’ But Eichman later denied it. No counting of the dead took place.
No statistical study was ever undertaken to attempt to determine the number of missing Jews.
All that happened, was that a German SS officer had his life spared on condition that he came out with the magic number, and he did so. He cited the word of another, who later denied it. Thereby the mantric number lived on, and the world believed it.
In January 1945 the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, taking with them the death-records, the so-called ‘Death Books.’ In May of that year they declared that four million had been murdered at Auschwitz, and people believed this, for they (the Soviets) had the records, though the Soviets did not specify how many were allegedly Jews. Finally in 1989 Mikhail Gorbachev made public these death-books, and it turned out they had the deaths of only twenty-nine thousand Jews recorded at the Auschwitz camp.
Some real numbers
- In all the lands ever occupied by the Nazis, there were probably fewer than four million Jews, including the multitude of survivors.
- How many died in the camps? The primary source here is the Arolsen Archives, set up after the War by the International Red Cross, which has thrice published its total of WW2 camp mortality. In 1979, its total recorded deaths for thirteen camps was 271,501; in 1984, that total was given for fifteen labour-camps, amounting to 282 thousand. Then finally in 1991 for the fifteen camps it was 296,071 ‘officially certified deaths in German concentration camps’.
- There were mainly Pol
es,
Russians and Jews in the German labour-camps, and
around 40% were Jewish, giving a total of 120
thousand deaths. There were probably around ten percent
of camp inmates unregistered at any given time, so let’s
increase that total to 130 thousand deaths. But,
to err on the side of caution, let’s quote the careful
writer Georges Thiel, who estimated (based on the
Arolsen totals) that there was ‘a theoretical maximum
of 200,000 authenticated deaths of Jews in all the
German camps for the whole National Socialist era.’ (Heresy,
in twenty-first century France, a case of
insubmission to the “Holocaust” dogma, 2010,
p.73). He was sent to jail for expressing this
sensible view. Some would put that total higher: thus
the US took records from the Dachau camp after
liberating it after the war, and they submitted at
Nuremberg a total of 25.6 thousand dead, which we
may compare to the 18.4 thousand for Dachau given by
the Red Cross/Arolsen - that is 40% more. - Between five and six million ‘Holocaust-survivors’ have come forward to take cash from Germany. It has paid out one hundred billion Deutschmarks overall. That figure was reached in 2002: (‘Germany Has Paid Out More Than $61.8 Billion in Third Reich Reparations’ Institute for Historical Review, 17,6) to some four million of these. They are mostly Jewish. There were various estimates around the turn of the century, of one million ‘holocaust survivors’ receiving compensation from Germany.
- From the Jewish Week 28 November 2003: Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer for the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found 1,092,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide. Lawrence Eagleburger, chairman of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, commissioned this survey, to help in distributing the yearly ‘humanitarian’ funding. The sheer number of these alleged survivors has totally undermined the claims made at Nuremberg of mass extermination. It is high time Germany ceased paying out that money.
- We have finally found one real figure of six million Jews: the number who have to-date applied to Germany for reparations, as alleged Holocaust-survivors.
Let us hope that future scholars will be allowed to investigate the WW2 figures of Jewish deaths in German labour-camps objectively, using primary-source documents, without having their careers terminated. Essential sources here are the British-intelligence decrypts, for the numbers in the camps 1941-42, the Death-Books of Auschwitz and the Arolsen Archives.
N.K.